The Scenario of rural India is quite obscure, in terms of healthcare infrastructure, services, and accessibility. The healthcare solutions in the remote areas of the country are undeniably inadequate and patchy. There is a need to bring possible solutions like accessibility and implementation of healthcare services.

To bring the changes in rural areas, Vihara Innovation Network (VIN), Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, NASSCOM 10K Startups and Startup Tunnel entered into a joint collaboration to conduct Hack- Health On; a healthcare focused hackathon. This initiative aimed at building mobile applications that would provide healthcare solutions to people staying in rural areas.

The event started on June 3rd  and continued till June 5th, 2015 at Vihara Innovation Campus, New Delhi. The pivotal theme of this event was to address the key challenges using mobile technology. The medical challenges included Maternal and Child healthcare, Nutrition, Diagnostics and Immunization.

Out of 160 applicants in total, 50 were shortlisted and grouped into 10 teams. From the eight stated problems, each team had to select one assignment for themselves. There were five participants from Xebia forming team “Xebians”. The team had Vikash (Ruby on rails Developer), Tushar (Android App Developer), Rahul (iOS & IoT), Anshul (Data Analyst) and Madhavi (UI/UX Developer).

On the first day, the teams were required to understand the underlying problem, determine the solution and consequently build it. There were experts and mentors to help the teams in identifying the right solution. Second day was all about preparing and pitching the presentation to mentors, tech experts and investors.

Touching upon the important aspects of maternal health issues, like complexities involved during labor, on time ambulance services, sexual education etc. Team Xebians’ challenge was to build a mobile solution for labor related issues. They created an android based Labor tracker application called Janani, along with a website “https://labor-tracker.herokuapp.com”.

So, what does this application do? The application and the website allows the doctors, medical staff involving midwives to log on to the system and see the list of patients. On a patient’s detail page, the doctor could see the details of the patients such as ID, address, blood group type. Under the category of medical history, the doctor could see a patient’s past medical history like operation, abortion or accidents,  if any.

The outstanding part of this product was that it could receive real-time data of patients through Internet of things (IoT).

Through the mobile application, the medical staff or the midwife from a rural area can easily connect live with the medical expert, sitting in a city. The app would instruct the staff to attach the sensors of the hardware (IoT device) to the patient. The device is enabled to measure readings such as pulse rate, fetal heart sound, blood pressure, track live ECG, body temperature of the patient. Consequently, these live readings would be fed into the cloud. As the information of the patient is readily available, the doctors sitting in a remote location can give instant feedback, guide the medical staff to take appropriate measures preventing any possible mishaps or labor complications.

The team did a commendable job during this 36-hour event and they were selected among the top three teams. The app was well received by the panelists that included industry experts and mentors.